Childhood
by TabathaEvans
Summary: They had been ten, once. / Brendan & May


**Childhood**

They had been ten, once.

That was only a year ago, but it could have been centuries.

They smiled and held hands and laughed and joked and rested in the shade of the trees in Littleroot town, but there was something broken beneath the smiles, and their knuckles were white, and the laughs were almost bitter and the jokes were forced because they were eleven and they had grown up too fast.

So they think back to the days when they were still children and the adults could protect them and everything was okay, before everything changed and they couldn't afford to be children anymore.

Her father had been offered a position as a gym leader, but it wasn't in her birth region of Johto. It wasn't even in nearby Kanto- it was far away in Hoenn, and they had to move there because one does not simply turn down an offer to be one of Napaj's gym leaders. So move they did, and her father flew but she and her mother took a boat and then a truck, and then she finally arrived in her new home.

May stayed there for all of two hours before she left on her journey.

Her mother understood- how could the child of a gym leader not want to go on a journey? Her father wholeheartedly approved, but only once she reassured him that she would travel with a friend.

He had always grown up with Pokémon. His father worked with them for a living, and had begun taking his son to work after the child's mother died, and despite Brendan being adopted he never doubted for a second that his father loved him and Pokémon. In a way, the Pokémon his father worked with were his siblings.

When his new neighbor received a Pokémon and left on a journey, he got one too and went with her.

It was the most natural thing in the world- Pokémon were so important to them, and here they were both newly ten and leaving on a journey from the same place, so why shouldn't they travel together?

Those were the days, back when they were happy and carefree and the only thing that mattered was training for the gyms.

But then, in a way they had been tied up in it all since the beginning. The first reported run-in with a grunt from either team had been the two of them protecting a Devon researcher. They were involved from the start, and they couldn't get out. It hadn't seemed like much at first- bringing back packages and saving a hostage Pokémon in between fighting trainers and catching new Pokémon and helping people to find dropped things.

All too quickly, however, it escalated into bruises sustained in fights at the museum, then stolen meteorites in the Falls, scrapes on Mt. Chimney, beatings in the Weather Institute, stinging cuts in the hideouts, broken bones on Mt. Pyre, hideous, scarring wounds in the Space Center, and torturous agony in underwater caverns as they frantically tried to stop Aqua and Magma from tearing apart the world.

Despite their best efforts, the Continent Behemoth and the Sea Basin Leviathan were revived, and the world was plunged into simultaneous drought and flood, the environment warring with itself. Civilians hid behind locked doors that offered the illusion of protection, the Gym Leaders (even her dad, her brave, brave father who never flinched from anything) couldn't do a thing, the Elite Four cowered in fear, and the very Champion himself ran away after shrugging responsibility onto their shoulders. The Teams, now terrified at the realization of their vision, watched in horror as the world tore itself apart, creaking and groaning and they were _ten, ten, ten,_ they were children and they could afford to be no longer.

So as the earth groaned under their feet, the fled to the sea, where waves seven times their height rose and fell, but they kept steadily on because they were mankind's only hope, a little boy and a little girl who were little no more, onward to a pillar reaching the heavens where redemption lay past horrible atonements. The guardians were old and strange and deadly, and a bone was sticking out of her leg and a slash was gushing blood into his eye but they could not stop, not now, because the fate of the world was in their hands and their hope had become desperation as they neared the top of the tower.

They could not even walk towards the end, crawling up stairs and praying to Jirachi the Wish Granter that somehow, somehow they could have the strength to endure, and finally they are face to face with the Sky High Ziz and they are pleading, pleading for their lives and for their families and for the world itself, and they collapse on the floor because their arms are too weak now, and can only hope as the celestial being flies away.

They may never know how they came back down the tower, because some things are too much for the human mind to bear, and they have suffered unimaginably and they have met a god and they can take no more, but how they get down is less important than the fact that they did, and their exhausted Pokémon emerge without being called to help- or so they piece together later, in the Sootopolis hospital they find themselves in when they awake.

They do not wish to think of these things any more, but the reporters are undeterred and will probably never let them alone so long as they refuse to speak, so they make a deal that says they will talk once but never again, and they return to the quiet town they emerged from not so long ago (yet forever ago, forever).

They make daisy chains and hold each other close when the nightmares come, and make friends with a boy named Wally who is only two years younger than them, but he is still a child and they will do anything in their power to keep it that way.

 _They had been ten, once, but the world was harsh and the world was cruel_

 _and they grew up far too fast._


End file.
